III. The Syrian War comes to an end
Something else that stands out is that none of the belligerents possessed sufficient strength to overcome the other. The SAA displayed incompetence throughout much of the war, and at one point, 60% of it had defected to the enemy; but all the same, the strength of the rebel armies only matched that of the strength of the SAA and more often fell below it.
Perhaps the rebels were kept deliberately weak by the US and other Western powers. By the time of the second phase of the war, which began in 2015, the West had come to see the war as a nuisance and an embarrassment. The West was frightened by the sudden success of ISIS, but did that translate into a desire to see the Assad regime fall? Clearly not: the West began making realpolitiker calculations, and this ‘Realism’ was noticed by other geopolitical actors – actors such as Russia, fresh from its triumph in Ukraine, where it had snatched the Crimea and the Donbas. After it intervened, Russia, along with Hezbollah and Iran (whose forces were commanded by the brute Soleimani), proceeded to ‘Grozny-fy’ the conflict: that is, cities were turned into rubble.
A peculiar status quo emerged. Israel strongly supported the Assad regime at the start of the Arab Spring and all throughout the civil war, and it only attacked the SAA after Assad had fallen. From the start of the Arab Spring and the Syrian war, Israel saw Assad as a ‘force for stability’ and the continuation of his rule as an instance of better the devil you know. During the war, Israel bombed only Hezbollah, the Iranian army, and associated militias; the Assad regime was left unscathed. All the powers, that is, Russia, Turkey, the US, and Israel, had made a gentleman’s agreement, one that stipulated that none of the powers were to attack the other. The rules of engagement – which side was allowed to be attacked, and by whom – became increasingly complex.
Responding to this, Western mainstream political opinion, and radical left-wing opinion, was confused and divided. You can see the split in an article from nearly ten years ago: it gives an account of a debate that took place in Sydney in 2017 (before an audience made up of Arabs and Muslims) between two left-wing academics, Dr Michael Karadjis and Dr Tim Anderson – Karadjis argued against the regime, Anderson for it. The article takes you back in time; both the situation and the rhetoric (Cold War-era thought-terminating clichés such as ‘imperialism’, ‘fascism’, etc.) are old and inappropriate. When the Far Left speaks, it speaks in code; ‘imperialism’, for instance, is a code word for the rule of the white man. But in the case of the Syrian war, the blame could not be pinned on the white man, and cut adrift, the Far Left did not know how to interpret the Syrian civil war – it lacked the conceptual equipment. No party line existed, as had in the good old days of the Soviet Union, and so, the Far Left splintered. One faction of the communist Left backed the Islamists who would eventually win the war – the hodgepodge of groups that changed its name from al-Nusra to JFS to HTS. Another faction threw its weight behind the regime and its sponsors Iran and Russia. A third faction – on the fringes of what is a fringe movement – liked ISIS for its ‘anti-imperialism’. A fourth faction, comprising the respectable Far Left, favoured the Kurds, who had won Western backing for their war on ISIS and then on Turkey and the Syrian rebels. In one of the strangest twists in 21st century politics, the most powerful of the Kurdish leaders, Abdullah Öcalan – leader of the Maoist PKK – had become enamoured of the writings of the Jewish anarchist and eco-warrior Murray Bookchin; Öcalan studied at the feet of Bookchin, a lucid and skilful propagandist, and set about converting the Kurds to Bookchin’s creed. Öcalan’s efforts bore fruit, and by the mid-2010s, many on the Far Left spoke glowingly of the ‘Rojava experiment’, Rojava being a town occupied by the Kurds and governed in accordance with feminist and eco-anarchist principles.
That covers the Far Left: what of the Far Right? In the first few months of the Arab Spring, I would discuss the Arab Spring with my Far Right comrades, who were largely uninterested in the subject. In my circle, one Serb nationalist, who freely admitted his racial animosity towards Arabs, jeered at the revolutionaries, and he declared that they were backward; his argument was that the Arab revolutionary wanted what the West had – liberalism, democracy, consumerism, ‘free and fair’ elections, and so forth – but upon attaining it, the Arab would come to realise that the ‘freedoms’ were hollow and not worth having. And that is as far as the discussion went; in 2011, by and large, the Far Right cared little for Arab affairs. Two years later, an intellectual comrade of mine was intrigued by the goings-on in Egypt: the downfall of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, so soon after the ousting of Mubarak, interested him, and he wrote an article about it, and that made him a rarity, for on the Far Right, no-one else was paying much attention.
In 2015, which was the year of the Russian intervention, the tenor changed. We saw the debut of the left-wing pseudo-journalist and ‘e-celeb’ who touted the Assad regime, Russia, and the ‘Axis of Resistance’, and who – although ostensibly left-leaning – sought to appeal to both the Far Right and Far Left. By the late 2010s, Assadist propaganda had extended its reach beyond RT (Russia Today) and SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency), and this was thanks to social media activists – and traditional media activists as well. The respected left-wing boomer journalist Robert Fisk had become embedded in the SAA and rode around in one of Assad’s tanks; quite literally, Fisk became a ‘tankie’. Other aged left-wing stalwarts, men such as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, took the side of the regime as well.
Interestingly, what most angered Assad’s followers on the Left and Right were the allegations that Assad used chemical weapons – possibly sarin, possibly chlorine – against civilians in Khan Shaykhun in 2017. The attack provoked the newly elected Trump; for some reason, chemical weapons are considered more heinous than explosives and incendiaries. Consequently, Alt-Leftists and Alt-Rightists went into overdrive in an attempt to cast doubts on the claims of gassing. Nowadays, of course, they are free to fly to Syria and investigate – they are free to examine government documents, interview eyewitnesses, and perform forensic analyses; but I doubt very much that they will.
After his election, Trump acted according to the same set of directives as Obama, which were: arm the Kurds in their war against ISIS, do not antagonise Russia and Turkey, and rule out regime change. The war in the late 2010s settled into a groove, a pattern, that in some respects followed the groove and pattern of WWI on the Western Front: because both sides were evenly matched, neither could overcome the other, and any gains made would not hasten the end of the war.
But by 2020, events had shifted in the favour of Assad. The rebels in Suwayda, which is in the south, were forced to relocate to the rebel enclave of Idlib, which is in the north, and were permitted to evacuate in buses. In the north-east, the Kurds were expelled from a strip on the border with Turkey, for the Turkish backed SNA (Syrian National Army), which has a thuggish reputation, had pushed the Kurds out. After the expulsion, the Russians and SAA moved in.
The Assad regime had achieved some military successes, to be sure, but the fundamental weakness of the SAA was revealed when an intriguing possibility, a path not taken, presented itself. In 2020, the SAA attacked Turkish outposts to the south of Idlib, killing 34 soldiers; and in perhaps the only instance of Turkey raising its hand against the SAA, Turkey retaliated, and it unleashed its pent-up military might. The Turkish army made use of drones, and little did we know that the tactics of the brief encounter would soon be adopted by armies all around the world. For our purposes, the Turkish and Syrian clash is interesting insofar as it tells us that Turkey, along with its allies, could have easily toppled the Assad regime, if that is what Turkey had truly wanted.
As the 2020s progressed, news coverage of the war diminished, understandably enough; time had moved on, and mass attention was devoted to the Covidian panic, lockdowns, and mandates; to the BLM riots in the US; to the extremely improbable electoral ‘victory’ of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.; and after that, to more mandates; and to the outbreak of a new Russo-Ukrainian war. Largely forgotten in all this was Syria, even after a devastating earthquake (7.8 on the Richter scale) made front page news. I did not forget, however, and now and then, when surveying the daily bulletins, I would come across a stray reference to Assad having ‘won the war’; I would then check the map and see that in Idlib, the rebels still held. Nevertheless, what I failed to perceive – for an iron curtain still hung across Syria – was that by the mid-2020s, the Assad regime had found itself in real trouble.
Because of hyperinflation, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey had been plunged into economic turmoil; and Syria and Lebanon were approaching economic collapse.
Normally, inflation comes about because of currencies that lose value against gold; the loss in value of the US dollar in the 1970s constitutes the classic example; in August 1971, the month Nixon took America and the world off the gold standard, an ounce of gold cost only $USD35 an ounce, that is, one US dollar was worth one-35th of an ounce of gold; and in January 1980, gold cost $USD850 an ounce, that is, one US dollar was worth one-850th of an ounce. In classical economics, which was the economics of Marx, the more dollars required to buy one ounce of gold, the more the inflation.
Now, one could pore over charts that show the deteriorating value of the Syrian pound, the Lebanese pound, and the Turkish lira in the 2020s (all three currencies being junk) against gold, but in all fairness, the global inflation of the early 2020s was to be attributed largely not to a decline in currency value but to a breakdown in the global supply chain. By government edict, millions in the early 2020s were forced out of work, and millions of businesses were forced to close; millions were made to stop producing, and millions were made to stop trading their produce. Never in history had a global recession – and global idleness – been engendered in order to prevent a virus from spreading. But the strangeness of it all is beside the point; we must direct our attention to the economics of the matter; and the principle is that when commodities become scarce (in this case because of a forced stoppage of production), the price of those commodities will rise. The Commodities Research Bureau (CRB) index tells the tale:
As a rule, inflation increases mistrust, and as Keynes said, inflation debauches morals: you may expect a US dollar – or a Syrian pound – to buy the same amount of goods tomorrow as it does today but after an inflation, you are to be sorely disappointed. And that disappointment leads to moral breakdown, for our moral system is built upon promises today that are made good tomorrow. And so, by eroding morals, inflation throws a political system out of kilter and quite severely.
Take, for example, the Republic of South Vietnam, which fell for two reasons. The first was the US was unwilling or unable to supply South Vietnam with the weapons and materiel needed to the thwart the 1974 North Vietnamese offensive, which was a surprise offensive and one that was in violation of the Paris peace accords; the second was that the South Vietnamese currency, the đồng, had fallen in value and quite dramatically, and the consequence of that fall was hyperinflation. Summing up, one could view the Vietnam War as a competition between two economic systems; and by the years 1971 to 1974, the years of global currency collapse, the economic system of South Vietnam – which was capitalism, a rather backward and corrupt capitalism, but capitalism nonetheless – had lost the argument.
Syria – or the Assad-dominated portion of it – in the early 2020s underwent a decline like that of South Vietnam’s. Assad’s Syria became more corrupt, and under pressure from sanctions, it came to rely on illicit enterprises such as the trafficking of Captagon. In those years, the Syrian Arab Army, never a great fighting force to begin with, had become hollowed out; a racehorse that had been weakened by inactivity and too indulgent a diet, it had become out of condition – Spengler would say, out of ‘form’. A complacency had set in; the world had forgotten Syria; why could not Syria forget the world?
In the histories of the late Vietnam War, we learn that North Vietnam had attacked in 1974 with the intention of conquering limited objectives; but meeting little to no resistance, the North Vietnamese army pressed on; thereby, an analogy between the North Vietnamese in 1974 and the Syrian jihadis in 2024 can be drawn. In late November 2024, the Syrian rebels wanted to take Aleppo, a major city, and to their surprise and everyone else’s, they succeeded; and so, the rebels moved on to the next targets, which were Homs and Hama; and both were taken without a struggle. Observers asked why it was that these major population centers, the sites of the most furious battles of the 2010s, fell so quickly.
Perhaps the answer is that in the crucial hour, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah failed to assist. Had it been the 2010s, these actors would have intervened and with full force; but being the 2020s, they were embroiled in new and interminable wars; and so, when justifying their inaction in Syria, they could cite military necessity; but, in the end, who knows what they were thinking. Perhaps, as some commentators alleged, Assad had offended too many people. In the early 2020s, Assad had refused to help Hezbollah and the Iranians in their war against Israel perhaps because of a secret pact. It could be that Assad sought to be all things to all men – Israeli, Iranian, Russian, Lebanese – and that by attempting to please everyone, Assad had ended up pleasing no-one.
We must, after 2024, carry out the exercise of shifting from one perspective to the other; that is, we must come to realise that the values and expectations of the 2010s do not hold true for the 2020s. In late 2024, Assad, expecting support from Iran, Lebanon, Russia, and the Alt-Left and Alt-Right network, the Mike Peinoviches and Tim Andersons, the Richard Spencers and Max Blumenthals, was bound to be disappointed; for the powers that had sustained him throughout the 2010s would not sustain him throughout the 2020s.
And so, after a little tap, Assad’s Captagon regime became unravelled. I confess that in December 2024, I made a mental exercise, which was a mistake on my part, of transposing 1945 Germany to 2024 Syria; I anticipated that a defiant Assad would make a last stand in Damascus, that he would make Damascus his Berlin, and that his loyalist forces would put up a fighting withdrawal, block by block, until they were at last overwhelmed, inevitably, by the onrushing tide. But Assad disappointed all of us who were expecting a grand and Wagnerian drama; he fled, without a fight, to Moscow. And that doomed him politically; had he died a martyr’s death, perhaps Assadism would have survived. It may have even survived had Assad been captured, subjected to a trial, and executed, or simply captured and killed – the fate of Ghaddafi.
Why, exactly, did Assad fall? When it comes to assessing the political strengths and weaknesses of the belligerents, we must grant that the rebels, in the 2020s, did a much better job of running Idlib than Assad did in running the Syria outside Idlib; the rebel administration collected garbage and provided electricity all in a timely manner whereas the Assad regime failed to deliver the most basic amenities; one can consider that to be trivial, but it is trivialities that count when assessing political support or the lack thereof. Jihadism hardly comes into it; for al-Sharaa embodies a new, technocratic Islam. And it is important to note that in 2025 the young, handsome, and presentable Sharaa was greeted with adulation wherever he went; that Syrians treated him like a rock star. And this is natural, because as a matter of course, Arabs acclaim charismatic and youthful reformers – look at the goodwill that attended Ghaddafi and Bashar upon their debuts.
But let us not forget the fate of Ghaddafi and Bashar.
IV. Conclusion: How to use Syria and Gaza
After Assad’s defeat and flight,
some of the old hands who had formed part of the anti-Assad Far Left came out
of the woodwork and exulted in the defeat of Ba’ath, even though they – with a
few exceptions – had hardly written anything on Assad and Syria after 2019, the
year by which Assad supposedly had won the war. As for the Far Right, only two
articles on Far Right sites – to my knowledge – remarking on the downfall of
Assad were published, one by Hadding Scott, the other by Karl Radl; these essays
decried the ouster of Assad, attributed it to an Israeli plot, and portrayed the
accounts of the gassings – in particular, the gas attacks at Ghouta in 2013 and
Khan Shaykoun in 2017 – as fakes and scams.
The Far-Right theses have been refuted by reality; the notion of the jihadist rebels and the HTS government as being secretly Zionist has been put to rest by Israel’s conduct after December 2024; Israel went to war against Syria after Assad’s reign, not during. In 2025, Israel, armed with cutting edge US technology and US backing without stint, waged war on the four fronts of Gaza, Yemen, Iran, and Syria. Israel carried out over a thousand bombing missions in aimed at destroying the leftover weapons, equipment, and vehicles of the SAA; it occupied hundreds of square kilometres of Syria; it kidnapped Syrians, shot Syrians, and killed Syrians with drones. In Israel’s campaign, one can easily divine the intentions of the Jewish State: Israel wants to partition Syria, and it desires a Druze state in the south and a Kurdish in the north. In 2025, the flow of events, which is rapid and disorienting, has overtaken the elucubrations of the Far Right and Far Left.
Scott’s article mentioned the notorious prison system, and the most notorious prison of all, Sednaya, which was, among other things, a homosexual rape dungeon. The ‘security services’ of the Middle East rely exclusively upon barbaric methods; to the governments of the Middle East, sodomy is policy. But Scott, a white nationalist associated with William Pierce’s National Alliance, dismissed the accounts of atrocities in Sednaya and the unearthing of mass graves as fakes, contrived, and so forth; and he took umbrage at the photos by the Syrian activist ‘Caesar’ of the cruelties of Sednaya. But in 2025, Scott is free to investigate: he can easily fly over to Damascus and count the bodies in the mass graves; and perhaps he can employ a Fred Leuchter to test the residue of gas – there must be some – at Ghouta and Khan Shaykoun.
I doubt that Scott will undertake such a step. That aside, it is important is to ask why it is that Scott thinks in the way that he does.
It is worth noting that Scott has written many excellent pieces that revise the history of WWII and the Holocaust. Considering Scott’s historical research helps us to arrive at an understanding of Scott’s state of mind, and after our contemplating Scott’s past work, a truth emerges, and that is this: Scott, like many others on the Far Right, believes that every year is 1946.
In 1946, the Allies held their IMT (International Military Tribunal) trial at Nuremberg, and if you read the transcripts, you will find absurdities such as the accusation that 20,000 Jews were killed by an atomic bomb explosion at Auschwitz, an accusation that elicited the laconic reply from Albert Speer – that this was the first he had heard of it. (Speer, being Speer, goes on to relate in pedantic fashion how the German nuclear research lagged that of the Allied). When levelling these charges, prosecutor Robert H. Jackson claimed to be in possession of evidence: and what sane person among us could deny that the evidence was fabricated? Our reading of the transcripts forces us to acknowledge that evidence marshalled in the trial was composed of absurdities and lies. For technical reasons, the prosecutors relied on absurdity, a powerful weapon in psychological warfare: for nothing confuses and intellectually disarms your opponent more than your making illogical, contradictory, and fantastical accusations.
The sad result of Nuremberg is that in the decades after 1946, generations of thinkers on the Far Right have taken the trial to be a model, an example of how the West treats its political opponents. In the world view of the post-1946 Far Right, every enemy of the West, of the US, of the ‘Atlanticists’, has been slandered; every atrocity story told against the enemy is a fabrication and a frame-up; and that holds true after 1990, when Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein were accused, and after 2011, when Muammar Ghaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin were accused. No doubt, in the event of a war between China and Taiwan, Xi Jinping will join the ranks of the wronged and the calumniated; in the Alt-Right and Alt-Left mind, such a crossing over is inevitable whenever the West goes to war against the ‘New Hitler’.
Why, then, believe in allegations of atrocities in Syria and disbelieve in allegations of atrocities in the Third Reich? A simple reason, which is this: you do not need to work to prove something that actually happened. (A researcher could, if he wanted, prove that the Tokyo firebombing, which took place eighty years ago, happened, and he could do so by inspecting US flight logs, conducting forensic examinations, and so forth; but why bother). The same rule applies to the massacres in Latakia in March 2025 and in Suwayda in July 2025.
By way of comparison, in Gaza after March 2025, hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli sniper, mortar, drone, artillery, and tank fire while waiting outside food distribution centres. At first, the American conservative media, when reporting on the killings, denied them, and brayed that the allegations of mass murder constituted a ‘blood libel’ against the Jews; and after a time, the conservative media stopped reporting; for the body pile had racked up at too fast a rate.
The lesson is that empirical proof, forensic proof, quickly overwhelms propaganda. In 1943, the Russians and the Allies were disturbed greatly by the German exposure of the Polish officers murdered at Katyn. But when considering Soviet history and all its appalling massacres – Kronstadt and Tambov come to mind – the Katyn killings carry little weight; Katyn was small potatoes; so why were the Russians so bothered? Because we in the West were allowed to peer behind the iron curtain. Atrocities such as Tambov had occurred far beyond the range of the prying eyes of the West, and in 1943, for the first time, a Russian massacre had become subject to Western standards of forensic examination.
(My advice to the Assadists who seek to obfuscate the horrors of the killing fields of Syria is this: take the path that the Russians took after the exposure of Katyn and blame the killings on the other fellow. In the war years, Assad did not control greater Damascus all the time; perhaps rebels on the outskirts massacred a 100,000 or so Syrians, buried them in mass graves, and thereby framed Assad…).
So, when considering simple standards of proof and evidence, we see that the defenders of Assad have obfuscated. And the examining of Assadist propaganda, whether it be the propaganda of the Far Right or the Far Left, reveals how Assadism inclines towards the communism of the ‘tankie’ and ‘Third Camp’ varieties. All the Third Positionists, all the ‘tankies’, and at least half of the Trotskyite movement, take the same favourable view of the statesmen who are warriors against the West – Milošević, Hussein, Ghaddafi, Assad, Putin, and perhaps in time, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un. And if we are to examine the political biographies of these men, we must confront the truth that these statesmen came to politics from the Far Left; that is especially true of Milošević and Putin, both of whom were reared on a steady diet of communism, anti-fascism, anti-Nazism, and the like. So why is that we white nationalists, ‘white supremacists’, ‘Neo-Nazis’, racialists, race realists, and whatever other names the uncomprehending world calls us, are championing men of the Far Left? The anti-Western warriors hate the white man, and this is even when they themselves – Milošević, Putin – are white.
Summing up, the most serious charge we can direct against the Third Positionists is that in the Levant, they missed the revolutionary moment.
From the start of the Syrian civil war and the start of the Libyan, we have heard the Far Left – and Right – lay the blame for both wars at the feet of Israel; and that Israel, the Jews, Mossad, the Zionists, inflamed the Arab masses against their Arab socialist rulers; and that the Jews functioned as a trickster god, pouring (in the words of that David Bowie song) ‘gasoline on the fire’. But in the years 2011 to 2024, Israel never bombed the Syrian Ministry of Defence; and in 2025, the year at the end of which Assad had become a ghost and a fast-fading memory, it did.
As to why, we know that the taking advantage of existing sectarian conflicts in Syria brings about the benefit of Israel – Israel being a nation that prospers by causing chaos and division.
To that end, Israel makes use of traitors. Amidst the turmoil of the Syrian ethnic and sectarian conflicts of post-Assad Syria, the Jewish State has found a new friend and the Syrian government a new enemy: Hikmat al-Hijri, powerful leader of a Druze faction that resists the government, blocks aid convoys, kidnaps Bedouin women, and commits ethnic and sectarian massacres. It should be no surprise that al-Hijri, Israel’s Druze man on the spot – and the new darling of the American conservative media – supported Assad.
All this bears on the American conservative media, which has lost all credibility in part because of Israel.
When Trump and Vance had their hostile encounter with Zelensky in the Oval Office, the conservative news sites almost unanimously – in a manner that was quite North Korean – hailed it as a diplomatic triumph, which it was not; America’s geopolitical partners and loyal allies were shocked by the display, which served as a textbook example of how to alienate friends and win enemies. The incident will go down in American history as a geopolitical disaster.
The
Zelensky quarrel happened in February 2025; in April 2025 came one of the worst
stock market crashes of the 21st century, one which most conservatives refused
to report. Fox News took down the ticker at the bottom of the screen – which in
that week would have shown a sea of red – for the first time in 28 years. In
these evasions, the conservatives were ignoring events of great consequence. Both
the DJIA and the S&P 500, when divided by the price of an ounce of gold,
never truly recovered from the April crash, and the economic boom and the stock
market boom of Trump’s second term, promised to voters in 2024, has yet to
begin.
The conservative reporting of the Gaza war represents the third example of conservativism’s blind spot. We know by now that the American Right cannot view ‘Zionism’ objectively, and indeed, we have known that for years. But the American conservative does not know, and if the American conservative pundit were persuaded, just for once, to step outside of his usual frame of mind, he should be asked: do you think Israel’s conduct – such as the hosting of a Hunger Games outside the GHF aid distribution centres, a contest in which the stakes are death or a measly bag of flour – is normal? Even if you are filled with the utmost contempt for the Palestinians, even if you do not care whether Palestinians live or die, you must admit that the sport that the Israeli soldiers had (which is akin to skeet shooting but with human beings instead of clay pigeons) with the Palestinians is a little odd.
And the conduct is not just odd, it is depraved; and no other nation in the world could possibly get away with what Israel does. In this century, if any political leader did what the Jewish heroes of the Bible – mass murderers and war criminals such as Simeon, Levi, Moses, Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, to name a few – did, he could expect to wind up in the Hague; but the conduct of the Israeli leaders and the diaspora runs counter to modern norms, and after a little honest reflection we come to realise that Netanyahu, Katz, and their diaspora supporters are trapped in a fantasy, a psychodrama, that is inspired by the Old Testament. David Sims examines part of the myth in Jews Are Serial Invadersof Palestine, Not “Original Occupants”.
When
considering it all, how does America respond? The US for a long time can ignore
world opinion and go it alone; but in its supporting Israel without stint, the
US runs the risk of ruining its good name, of tarnishing its reputation; you,
as a great power, can thumb your nose at the world all you like, but sooner or
later, you will come to realise that you do not live in splendid isolation and
that you do need the help of others. The State of Israel, which is, in the
words of Laurent Guyenot, ‘the psychopathic nation’ (in an essay which seems to
have been written 20 years ago but could have been written today) hardly counts
as a good friend. The two states America and Israel present an odd contrast,
and the relationship is as incongruous as that of between two unmatched and
dissimilar children in a playground. Why did the healthy and wholesome
schoolboy attach himself to the creepy and isolated schoolboy who tears the wings off
flies and who, after growing tired of this, graduates to torturing mice? On the
geopolitical stage, smaller and weaker nations will ask why it is that the US
associates with Israel, a deeply unpopular nation, and being unable to come up
with any reasonable explanation, will come to doubt America’s goodness. They
may even resort to psychiatry and diagnose a ‘co-dependency’. And this raises two questions: can a psychopath change himself, redeem himself; and can a cycle
of co-dependency be broken?
The answers will help determine the future of the West. On Capitol Hill, Israeli and Jewish influence matters, Arab influence matters not; no Syrian Alawite, Druze, or Bedouin lobby exists in Washington DC; for the only foreign lobby that possesses any clout is the Jewish-Israeli. Which is to say that in American political calculations, the Arabs do not amount to much, and neither do the Arab victims of Israel’s aggression.
Having said that, the grisly history of the Assad and Sharaa regimes can distract, and it can assume an outsized importance; when contemplating the Syrian story, one’s attention is temporarily removed from the Israel story, and one is forced to confront the reality of the Levantine – his cruelty, his violence, his hair-trigger temper – that is, all the Levantine racial qualities that frustrate the Far Left. We must understand that the Far Left, which is to say, the communist movement, does not dismiss Carl Schmitt entirely; it does not spurn Schmitt’s interpretation of the political as the Friend / Enemy distinction; it only wants the capitalists and the bourgeoisie to be lined up on the Enemy side, and the ‘workers’ on the Friend. But in contravention to the Marxist model, the Levantine Arabs form up in religious and ethnic groups, as we have seen with the recent disturbances in Suwayda, in which the Bedouins outside the province travelled a great distance to fight on behalf of the Bedouins inside; Arabs organise themselves along the lines of tribe, clan, faith, and ethnicity – and not class.
Our conclusion, then, is that the Leftist political model breaks down in the Levant; but how does that relate to us? Here I have spent a great deal of time on Arab affairs, but my main purpose has been to sketch an outline of a plan of action that is for the Far Right; and one obstacle that my plan will encounter is that many on the Far Right reject politics altogether; it is as though their insight into the Jewish question has numbed them; in their myopic world view, the Jew controls every political candidate, including Trump, and thereby excluded every political possibility; there is nothing to be done; the end is nigh; etc., etc.
These malcontents, who are to be found in the comments sections of American white nationalist sites proffering wisdom, or rather, poisoning morale and spreading discontent, have been, in Alt-Right parlance, thoroughly black-pilled. They do not engage in politics, because, I suppose, their idea of politics is restricted; in their conception, politics is confined to the endeavours of running for office, debating in parliament, etc.; but the Far Left, to its credit, possesses a broader understanding. We can verify that if we consult The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (1952) by Philip Selznick, a Jewish sociologist and former communist activist. To see how fresh and contemporary this work was, consider that it was published one year before Stalin’s death and not even ten years before the end of WWII. In The Organizational Weapon, Selznick describes communism in its prime, and once he reads it, the white nationalist will absorb its lessons and look at politics in an entirely different way.
From Cold War accounts of communism such as Selznick’s, we learn that like every political practitioner, the communist activist aims at taking office; that he looks to it as the ultimate goal; that he views Lenin’s career in the years 1905 to 1917 as a model, indeed, the one ideal worthy of emulation; and that even so, he holds to a conception of a politics that extends beyond the sphere of parliament. And once we begin to view politics in such terms, terms that lie outside the spheres that we traditionally think of as being political, we learn to perceive shifts, ebbs, flows, both national and international; and when applying the model to the politics of 2025, we can detect a turning against Israel – and America’s propping up of Israel.
For our purposes, this raises the interesting question as to how far the antipathy of the liberals – or even the apolitical – towards the State of Israel goes. Could the revulsion felt towards the Jewish treatment of the Palestinians develop into ‘anti-Semitism’ of the Hitlerian sort? Israel itself does not know; it operates in a fog of war; and so, it follows the course of lashing out blindly and accusing all and sundry of ‘anti-Semitism’. One of the marks of the psychopath, according to Guyenot, is that he does not understand others and that he cannot even begin to guess what it is that they feel towards him; and one consequence is that when he does something grotesque (such as stage a Hunger Games), he does not understand the abhorrence and revulsion of others. Israel’s only response to criticising and chastising is a colloquial phrase delivered in a Yiddish accent: ‘Enough already!’. (And perhaps he adds in the same accent: ‘Vasn’t six million enough for you?’). Liberals, particularly in the West, are not used to a line of argumentation that is not really a line of argumentation at all, a line that is what the pop psychologists call ‘gaslighting’. Relentlessly, the psychopath probes for any latent guilt and self-doubt in his victim with a view to exploiting it; he himself never experiences guilt, shame, self-doubt, remorse; and if we become persuaded by his one-sidedness, as the American conservatives have been, we become convinced of the proposition – despite all the suffering and death rained down upon his victims – that the world owes this Middle Eastern, Levantine, and Semitic psychopath, and that the world owes Israel and by extension all the Jews.
The conclusion is that, even if we have not arrived at a satisfactory definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, we can see how Israel’s military tactics in Gaza and the West, and Israel’s attempts, largely ineffectual, to manipulate world opinion and mask the horrors inflicted upon the Gazans in Jewry’s name, lead in the long run and perhaps the short to ‘anti-Semitism’ - whatever ‘Semitism’ itself may be.
Assessing the politics of the 2020s, then, we can state: cracks are appearing, tensions are being felt, and possibilities are presenting themselves. In the past few decades, the international political establishment has all at times given the impression of unanimity; one only need to look to the rhetoric and the practice in lockdown years, 2020 to 2022, when politicians, journalists, and health professionals from Moscow to Melbourne all spoke the same lines, as though they were reading from the same script. But every now and then, we mortals became privy to debates that occur within th e establishment; and it is then that we saw divisions. In the 2020s, the rupture that became the most prominent was the one that spread after the outbreak of the Gaza war. Thanks to social mediaand the smart phone, the qualities of Israel, the ‘psychopathic nation’, could no longer be concealed; and intelligent observers in the West began thinking - in heretical fashion - that if Israel is not Jewish, what is?
The break reminds me of one other, one that occurred during a series of violent incidents in New York and New Jersey in late 2019 and early 2020; this was a time when African Americans in the two states expressed outrage against members of Orthodox Jewry who had migrated, en masse, into African American neighbourhoods.
A Marxist would characterise that conflict as a conflict over scarce resources. Selznick writes that ‘Marxist doctrine stresses the division of society into segments having latent interests’; and that inevitably in this political model, breaks do occur. ‘According to this view, men are moved by social needs and pressures toward unity or into conflict’. After a hundred years of Leninism, we know that Marxists keep an eye open for any social and racial disturbances with a view to exploiting them – see the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. But the same Marxists would have taken a contrary course had the 2019 and 2020 conflicts between Jews and Blacks proved to be lasting: we can surmise that the Marxist would have worked to the utmost to divert the energy of the blacks into safe channels: we know the score: in the Marxist view, African-Americans, by all rights, ought to be directing their animosity away from Orthodox Jews and towards the ‘bosses’, the ‘bourgeoisie’, the ‘capitalist class’, the white man.
We must remember that the Far Left after March 2020 never once agitated against lockdowns, mandates, travel bans, masking, contact-tracing, etc., but it did agitate, without cease, against Trump and against statues of white men. When assessing the radical politics of the early 2020s, we must conclude that the Marxist served as an arm of an establishment, an establishment that, as it so happens, was united when it came to opposing Trump in 2020, disunited when it came to opposing Israel in 2023.
To return to late 2019 and early 2020. The Far Left never took advantage of the racial disturbances in New Jersey and New York, and neither did the Far Right; for the latter, the disturbances represent a lost opportunity. And the exploring of these forgotten anti-Jewish incidents, and the reflecting upon the could-have-beens and what-ifs, leads us to two differing conceptions of politics – one conception that is static, the other dynamic.
We are all familiar with that type of poster on American white nationalist message boards who insists that nothing can be done, that we are all damned, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is either a servant of the establishment or a fool; always, he strives to demoralise. Such a misanthrope holds to a static view, and in his Weltanschauung, no change is possible; indeed, no possibilities exist. The static view contrasts with the dynamic, and when looking for examples of the dynamic Weltanschauung, we need look no further than to two ideas that gripped the world in the first half of the 20th century, one having its origin in Russia, the other, in Germany.
The politics of the present favours a dynamic and not a static conception. A scrutinising of Gaza in 2025 reveals a shift; the awareness of the suffering of the Palestinians has moved outside of the normal circumference of the Left and into the mainstream and further, into that part of the electorate that traditionally places itself outside of normal politics. That, and the cracks and fissures in the political establishment that appeared when members of the establishment were forced once and for all to confront the realities of ‘Zionism’, Old Testament Judaism in modern guise, gives activists on our side of politics an opening.
Perhaps the unique possibilities can be better understood if we consider the following metaphor. Your job, as a political activist, is to win votes, even at non-election time; and your job is to win votes in spheres in which electoral votes are usually not cast. In late 2019 and early 2020, a section of the black community in New Jersey and New York cast votes – mentally – for our ideas. But in 2025, the circumstances differ. Lenin wrote a hundred years ago that ‘the meaning of the term “masses” changes in accordance with the changes in the character of the struggle’: in other words, who your audience is, what section of a community it is that you appeal to, changes just as circumstances change. Applying Lenin’s principle to the contemporary political scene, we ask: the sections that are concerned and disturbed by what Israel is doing and what the Jewish lobby is doing – how do we reach them?
